The Caves of Steel

by Isaac Asimov

  “Does the Commissioner know of this?”

  “We have never explained it to him flatly, as I have just done to you. He may guess it, however. He is quite an intelligent man.”

  “If he guessed it, he might have told me,” Baley said reflectively.

  Dr. Fastolfe lifted his eyebrows. “If he had, then you wouldn’t have considered the possibility of R. Daneel being a human Spacer. Is that it?”

  Baley shrugged slightly, tossing the matter to one side.

  But Dr. Fastolfe went on, “That’s quite true, you know. Putting the psychological difficulties to one side, the terrible effect of the noise and crowds upon us, the fact remains that for one of us to enter the City is the equivalent of a death sentence. It is why Dr. Sarton initiated his project of humanoid robots. They were substitute men, designed to enter the City instead of us—”

  “Yes. R. Daneel explained this to me.”

  “Do you disapprove?”

  “Look,” said Baley, “since we’re talking to one another so freely, let me ask a question in simple words. Why have you Spacers come to Earth anyway? Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  Dr. Fastolfe said, with obvious surprise, “Are you satisfied with life on Earth?”

  “We get along.”

  “Yes, but for how long will that continue? Your population goes up continuously; the available calories meet the needs only as a result of greater and greater effort. Earth is in a blind alley, man.”

  “We get along,” repeated Baley stubbornly.

  “Barely. A City like New York must spend every ounce of effort getting water in and waste out. The nuclear power plants are kept going by uranium supplies that are constantly more difficult to obtain even from the other planets of the system, and the supply needed goes up steadily. The life of the City depends every moment on the arrival of wood pulp for the yeast vats and minerals for the hydroponic plants. Air must be circulated unceasingly. The balance is a very delicate one in a hundred directions, and growing more delicate each year. What would happen to New York if the tremendous flow of input and outgo were to be interrupted for even a single hour?”

  “It never has been.”

  “Which is no security for the future. In primitive times, individual population centers were virtually self-supporting, living on the produce of neighboring farms. Nothing but immediate disaster, a flood or a pestilence or crop failure, could harm them. As the centers grew and technology improved, localized disasters could be overcome by drawing on help from distant centers, but at the cost of making ever larger areas interdependent. In Medieval times, the open cities, even the largest, could subsist on food stores and on emergency supplies of all sorts for a week at least. When New York first became a City, it could have lived on itself for a day. Now it cannot do so for an hour. A disaster that would have been uncomfortable ten thousand years ago, merely serious a thousand years ago, and acute a hundred years ago would now be surely fatal.”

  Baley moved restlessly in his chair. “I’ve heard all this before. The Medievalists want an end to Cities. They want us to get back to the soil and to natural agriculture. Well, they’re mad; we can’t. There are too many of us and you can’t go backward in history, only forward. Of course, if emigration to the Outer Worlds were not restricted—”

  “You know why it must be restricted.”

  “Then what is there to do? You’re tapping a dead power line.”

  “What about emigration to new worlds? There are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy. It is estimated that there are a hundred million planets that are inhabitable or can be made inhabitable.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why?” asked Dr. Fastolfe, with vehemence. “Why is the suggestion ridiculous? Earthmen have colonized planets in the past. Over thirty of the fifty Outer Worlds, including my native Aurora, were directly colonized by Earthmen. Is colonization no longer possible?”

  “Well …”

  “No answer? Let me suggest that if it is no longer possible, it is because of the development of City culture on Earth. Before the Cities, human life on Earth wasn’t so specialized that they couldn’t break loose and start all over on a raw world. They did it thirty times. But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever. You, Mr. Baley, won’t even believe that a City dweller is capable of crossing country to get to Spacetown. Crossing space to get to a new world must represent impossibility squared to you. Civism is ruining Earth, sir.”

  Baley said angrily, “And if it does? How does it concern you people? It’s our problem. We’ll solve it. If not, it’s our own particular road to hell.”

  “Better your own road to hell than another’s road to heaven, eh? I know how you must feel. It is not pleasant to listen to the preaching of a stranger. Yet I wish your people could preach to us, for we, too, have a problem, one that is quite analogous to yours.”

  Baley smiled crookedly. “Overpopulation?”

  “Analogous, not identical. Ours is underpopulation. How old would you say I was?”

  The Earthman considered for a moment and then deliberately over-estimated. “Sixty, I’d say.”

  “A hundred and sixty, you should say.”

  “What!”

  “A hundred and sixty-three next birthday, to be exact. There’s no trick to that. I’m using the Standard Earth year as the unit. If I’m fortunate, if I take care of myself, most of all, if I catch no disease on Earth, I may double that age. Men on Aurora have been known to live over three hundred and fifty years. And life expectancy is still increasing.”

  Baley looked to R. Daneel (who throughout the conversation had been listening in stolid silence), as though he were seeking confirmation.

  He said, “How is that possible?”

  “In an underpopulated society, it is practical to concentrate study on gerontology, to do research on the aging process. In a world such as yours, a lengthened life expectancy would be disastrous. You couldn’t afford the resulting rise in population. On Aurora, there is room for tricentenarians. Then, of course, a long life becomes doubly and triply precious.

  “If you were to die now, you would lose perhaps forty years of your life, probably less. If I were to die, I would lose a hundred fifty years, probably more. In a culture such as ours, then, individual life is of prime importance. Our birth rate is low and population increase is rigidly controlled. We maintain a definite robot/man ratio designed to maintain the individual in the greatest comfort. Logically, developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature.”

  Baley interrupted. “You mean you kill them if they don’t—”

  “If they don’t measure up. Quite painlessly, I assure you. The notion shocks you, just as the Earthman’s uncontrolled breeding shocks us.”

  “We’re controlled, Dr. Fastolfe. Each family is allowed so many children.”

  Dr. Fastolfe smiled tolerantly. “So many of any kind of children; not so many healthy children. And even so, there are many illegitimates and your population increases.”

  “Who’s to judge which children should live?”

  “That’s rather complicated and not to be answered in a sentence. Someday we may talk it out in detail.”

  “Well, where’s your problem? You sound satisfied with your society.”

  “It is stable. That’s the trouble. It is too stable.”

  Baley said, “Nothing pleases you. Our civilization is at the ragged edge of chaos, according to you, and your own is too stable.”

  “It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries. There is no prospect for colonization in the future. Our lives in the Outer Worlds are too long to risk and too comfortable to upset.”

  “I don’t know about that, Dr. Fastolfe. You’ve come to Earth. You risk disease.”

  “Yes, I do. There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race i
s even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I am sorry to say.”

  “All right. We’re coming to the point. How is Spacetown helping matters?”

  “In trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we’re doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy.”

  “That’s your way of helping?” Baley’s lips quivered. “You mean you’re creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?”

  “Not out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don’t you see that the City’s womb has failed the displaced man. He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth.”

  “But it isn’t working.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Dr. Fastolfe, sadly. “There is something wrong. The resentment of the Earthman for the robot blocks things. Yet those very robots can accompany humans, smooth the difficulties of initial adjustment to a raw world, make colonization practical.”

  “Then what? More Outer Worlds?”

  “No. The Outer Worlds were established before Civism had spread over Earth, before the Cities. The new colonies will be built by humans who have the City background plus the beginnings of a C/Fe culture. It will be a synthesis, a cross-breeding. As it stands now, Earth’s own structure must go ricketing down in the near future, the Outer Worlds will slowly degenerate and decay in a somewhat further future, but the new colonies will be a new and healthy strain, combining the best of both cultures. By their reaction upon the older worlds, including Earth, we ourselves may gain new life.”

  “I don’t know. It’s all misty, Dr. Fastolfe.”

  “It’s a dream, yes. Think about it.” Abruptly the Spacer rose to his feet. “I have spent more time with you than I intended. In fact, more time than our health ordinances allow. You will excuse me?”

  Baley and R. Daneel left the dome. Sunlight, at a different angle, somewhat yellower, washed down upon them once again. In Baley, there was a vague wonder whether sunlight might not seem different on another world. Less harsh and brazen perhaps. More acceptable.

  Another world? The ugly Spacer with the prominent ears had filled his mind with queer imaginings. Did the doctors of Aurora once look at the child Fastolfe and wonder if he ought to be allowed to mature? Wasn’t he too ugly? Or did their criteria include physical appearance at all? When did ugliness become a deformity and what deformities …

  But when the sunlight vanished and they entered the first door that led to the Personal, the mood became harder to maintain.

  Baley shook his head with exasperation. It was all ridiculous. Forcing Earthmen to emigrate, to set up a new society! It was nonsense! What were these Spacers really after?

  He thought about it and came to no conclusion. Slowly, their squad car rolled down the vehicular lane. Reality was surging all about Baley. His blaster was a warm and comfortable weight against his hip. The noise and vibrant life of the City was just as warm, just as comfortable.

  For a moment, as the City closed in, his nose tingled to a slight and fugitive pungence.

  He thought wonderingly: The City smells.

  He thought of the twenty million human beings crammed into the steel walls of the great cave and for the first time in his life he smelled them with nostrils that had been washed clean by outdoor air.

  He thought: Would it be different on another world? Less people and more air—cleaner?

  But the afternoon roar of the City was all around them, the smell faded and was gone, and he felt a little ashamed of himself.

  He let the drive rod in slowly and tapped a larger share of the beamed power. The squad car accelerated sharply as it slanted down into the empty motorway.

  “Daneel,” he said.

  “Yes, Elijah.”

  “Why was Dr. Fastolfe telling me all he did?”

  “It seems probable to me, Elijah, that he wished to impress you with the importance of the investigation. We are not here just to solve a murder, but to save Spacetown and with it, the future of the human race.”

  Baley said dryly, “I think he’d have been better off if he’d let me see the scene of the crime and interview the men who first found the body.”

  “I doubt if you could have added anything, Elijah. We have been quite thorough.”

  “Have you? You’ve got nothing. Not a clue. Not a suspect.”

  “No, you are right. The answer must be in the City. To be accurate, though, we did have one suspect.”

  “What? You said nothing of this before.”

  “I did not feel it to be necessary, Elijah. Surely it is obvious to you that one suspect automatically existed.”

  “Who? In the devil’s name, who?”

  “The one Earthman who was on the scene. Commissioner Julius Enderby.”

  10.

  AFTERNOON OF A PLAIN-CLOTHES MAN

  The squad car veered to one side, halted against the impersonal concrete wall of the motorway. With the humming of its motor stopped, the silence was dead and thick.

  Baley looked at the robot next to him and said in an incongruously quiet voice, “What?”

  Time stretched while Baley waited for an answer. A small and lonesome vibration rose and reached a minor peak, then faded. It was the sound of another squad car, boring its way past them on some unknown errand, perhaps a mile away. Or else it was a fire car hurrying along toward its own appointment with combustion.

  A detached portion of Baley’s mind wondered if any one man any longer knew all the motorways that twisted about in New York City’s bowels. At no time in the day or night could the entire motorway system be completely empty, and yet there must be individual passages that no man had entered in years. With sudden, devastating clarity, he remembered a short story he had viewed as a youngster.

  It concerned the motorways of London and began, quietly enough, with a murder. The murderer fled toward a prearranged hideout in the corner of a motorway in whose dust his own shoeprints had been the only disturbance for a century. In that abandoned hole, he could wait in complete safety till the search died.

  But he took a wrong turning and in the silence and loneliness of those twisting corridors he swore a mad and blaspheming oath that, in spite of the Trinity and all the saints, he would yet reach his haven.

  From that time on, no turning was right. He wandered through an unending maze from the Brighton Sector on the Channel to Norwich and from Coventry to Canterbury. He burrowed endlessly beneath the great City of London from end to end of its sprawl across the south-eastern corner of Medieval England. His clothes were rags and his shoes ribbons, his strength wore down but never left him. He was tired, tired, but unable to stop. He could only go on and on with only wrong turnings ahead of him.

  Sometimes he heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast he rushed (for he would gladly have given himself up by then) the corridors he reached were always empty. Sometimes he saw an exit far ahead that would lead to the City’s life and breath, but it always glimmered further away as he approached until he would turn—and it would be gone.

  Occasionally, Londoners on official business through the underground would see a misty figure limping silently toward them, a semi-transparent arm lifted in pleading, a mouth open and moving, but soundless. As it approached, it would waver and vanish.

  It was a story that had lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore. The “Wandering Londoner” had become a familiar phrase to all the world.

  In the depths of New York City, Baley remembered the story and stirred uneasily.

  R. Daneel spoke and there was a small echo to his voice. He said, “We may be overheard.”

  “Down here? Not a chance. Now what about the Commissioner?”

  “He was on the scene, Elijah. He is a City dweller. He was inevitably a suspect.”


  “Was! Is he still a suspect?”

  “No. His innocence was quickly established. For one thing, there was no blaster in his possession. There could not very well be one. He had entered Spacetown in the usual fashion; that was quite certain; and, as you know, blasters are removed as a matter of course.”

  “Was the murder weapon found at all, by the way?”

  “No, Elijah. Every blaster in Spacetown was checked and none had been fired for weeks. A check of the radiation chambers was quite conclusive.”

  “Then whoever had committed the murder had either hidden the weapon so well—”

  “It could not have been hidden anywhere in Spacetown. We were quite thorough.”

  Baley said impatiently, “I’m trying to consider all possibilities. It was either hidden or it was carried away by the murderer when he left.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And if you admit only the second possibility, then the Commissioner is cleared.”

  “Yes. As a precaution, of course, he was cerebroanalyzed.”

  “What?”

  “By cerebroanalysis, I mean the interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells.”

  “Oh,” said Baley, unenlightened. “And what does that tell you?”

  “It gives us information concerning the temperamental and emotional makeup of an individual. In the case of Commissioner Enderby, it told us that he was incapable of killing Dr. Sarton. Quite incapable.”

  “No,” agreed Baley. “He isn’t the type. I could have told you that.”

  “It is better to have objective information. Naturally, all our people in Spacetown allowed themselves to be cerebroanalyzed as well.”

  “All incapable, I suppose.”

  “No question. It is why we know that the murderer must be a City dweller.”

  “Well, then, all we have to do is pass the whole City under your cute little process.”

  “It would not be very practical, Elijah. There might be millions temperamentally capable of the deed.”

  “Millions,” grunted Baley, thinking of the crowds of that long ago day who had screamed at the dirty Spacers, and of the threatening and slobbering crowds outside the shoe store the night before.